(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) The globally No.2 storage player, NetApp, is focusing on the Middle East and has termed it a 'hyper-growth' market with large investments planned for the region, said a senior official of the Nasdaq-listed firm.
"Currently we have offices in the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman and are further expanding in region in an aggressive way. The company has registered a double-digit growth [in 2013] in the region and recorded $6.3 billion in global revenues in 2012," Konstantin Ebert, director Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa, NetAPP told Khaleej Times in an exclusive interview on his visit to Dubai.
"The Middle East, Eastern Europe and African markets are particularly important as we see growth emerging from this region. We see the UAE as a very dynamic market with its leadership heading for building a smartcity and with Expo 2020 in offing. Dubai also leads in the region as far as technology growth is concerned. The company is already hiring and we are planning to ramp up the workforce in the region."
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver cost efficiency, accelerate business breakthroughs and see that the role of Chief Information officers, or CIOs in the Middle East will undergo lot of changes.
Explains Ebert: "The role of CIOs in the region will undergo a massive change as it is no more a conventional role of merely providing IT services to the firm, but also to help the company get the best of services keeping cost factors in consideration. CIOs are moving from being builders and operators of data centers to becoming brokers of application and information services. They are embracing new technologies and service models to deliver IT faster, cheaper, and smarter, while making their companies more responsive and competitive." The company, which is the No.1 storage provider to the US government, is currently boasting of 13,000 plus employees and 150 offices. "Customers rely on NetApp to store, manage, protect, and retain their most precious corporate asset - their data. They use our innovative storage and data management solutions for business-application, virtualisation, and cloud environments," Ebert said.
"Organisations leverage clustered Data Ontap to create a shared infrastructure that improves the economics, speed, and scale of business. Our broad flash portfolio includes hybrid and ultra-high performance flash arrays that accelerate business operations and improve our customers' experience. Our big data solutions simplify the management of massive, fixed-content storage systems and E-Series systems help customers meet the demanding performance and capacity requirements of dedicated workloads," he added.
In 2014, the company predicts that hybrid clouds will become the dominant vision for IT; questions on data sovereignty will impact private and public storage; 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GbE) (a standard that enables the transfer of Ethernet frames at speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second) adoption will take off in the data center; big data evolves from analysing the data you have to driving the collection of new data and clustered storage; converged infrastructure, object storage, in-memory databases will all continue momentum in 2014.
Recently, the firm also took its NetApp Partner Programme to the next level by helping capitalise on new opportunities and better serve customers' needs. NetApp fundamentally streamlined processes and introduced a programme that supports how partners want to evolve their business and one contract for re-sellers, regional service providers, regional systems integrators and vertical solution integrators with access to the same incentives and support for current and future capabilities.
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